by An open mic night, a room of eleven people and the difference between writing a joke and saying one out loud
I Did Five Minutes of Stand-Up Above a Pub in Angel and Nobody Died Except Me
I would like to begin by saying that it was not my idea. It was the editor’s. She said, about a fortnight ago, that I write like someone who has never heard her own jokes land in a room, and that I should go and find out what silence sounds like. I thought she was being poetic. She was being literal. She had put my name down.
So last night I climbed a staircase beside the toilets of a pub in Angel, into a room with a low ceiling, a carpet that had seen things, thirty folding chairs and a microphone on a stand in front of a red curtain held up with drawing pins. And I did five minutes of stand-up comedy. I have not been the same since.
How It Works
For anyone thinking of trying it: London has dozens of these nights, any evening of the week, mostly in rooms above pubs. They are called open mics. You email the person who runs it, or turn up early and put your name on a list. You get five minutes. When you have had four, somebody at the back shines a phone torch at you, and when you have had five they do it again, with meaning. Nobody is paid. Often you are expected to bring a friend who will buy a drink, since otherwise the audience is made up entirely of the other acts, waiting for their turn and not listening to yours.
There were sixteen acts last night and eleven people who were not acts. One of those was the barman, who came up to collect glasses. One was my dad.
Yes, My Dad
I had told him not to come. He came. He sat in the second row in his work fleece with a pint of bitter and his arms folded, looking like a man who has been told his car has failed its test. He does not go to comedy. He does not really go to London. He had got two buses and a Tube and asked a policeman.
I was eleventh on the bill. That meant I got to watch ten people first, which I do not recommend. Some were good. A woman of about fifty did five minutes on her divorce that was so sharp the room actually leaned forward. A lad my age read one-liners off his hand and got three proper laughs. A man with a ukulele should be stopped, by law.
And with every one of them I could feel my own five minutes going sour in my bag, like milk.
What I Had Prepared
I had done what I know. I had taken my twelve best headlines from the paper, the ones the editor had ticked, the ones that had done well on the London satirical news page, and I had typed them out in order. I thought: these are proven. Strangers on the internet have laughed at these. I will read them out and it will be like the website, but with applause.
The host said my name wrong, there was a small clap, and I walked up to the microphone, which was set for somebody a foot taller. I spent my first eight seconds on stage wrestling a metal pole. That got a laugh. It was the biggest laugh I got.
The Silence
I read the first headline. Nothing. I do not mean a small response. I mean the sound a room makes when thirty people are waiting for you to start. I looked up. They were looking at me pleasantly, as if I had cleared my throat.
I read the second. A cough. The third. Somebody’s chair creaked. I could hear the fruit machine downstairs. I could hear my dad breathing.
And standing there, in a silence I could have leaned on, I understood the thing she had sent me to learn. A headline on a page works because your eye takes it in all at once and your own head does the rest. Out loud, it is just a sentence. There is no page. There is no straight-faced newspaper around it to make it funny. There is a girl in a room, saying a sentence, and then stopping.
The paper’s piece on what satirical commentary is, and what it is not says the joke is in the gap between the serious form and the daft content. I had read that a dozen times. I had never felt it. I had brought the content and left the form on the bus.
Minute Three
I had nine headlines left and no reason to believe in any of them. So I stopped. I put the paper down on the stool. I said, right, those work better written down. I write for a newspaper. Those have all been published. My editor sent me here to find out what silence sounds like, and I would like her to know that I have found out.
That got a laugh. A real one. So I kept going, with nothing prepared, which is the most frightening thing I have ever done, including my driving test. I told them about the fifty headlines a day and the red pen. I told them about the corridor that was a studio flat. I told them about the man in Shoreditch who explained jokes to me for eighteen holes. And then I said, and my dad is here, he is the one in the fleece, he got two buses, and he still thinks I write the actual news.
The whole room turned round to look at him. He did not unfold his arms. He just nodded, once, at the room, like a man acknowledging a fair point. And that got the biggest laugh of the night, and it was not even mine. It was his.
Then the torch came on and I said thank you and got off.
Afterward
The woman with the divorce found me at the bar. She has been doing this six years. She said the first two minutes were the worst she had seen all month and the last three were an act. She said, you write jokes, fine, but up there you are not the joke, you are the person it happened to. She said to throw away the headlines and keep the dad.
The host said I could come back in a fortnight. I think that is good. I think he says it to everyone.
The Journey Home
Dad and I got the Tube to Liverpool Street and then the bus. He did not say much. Past Stratford he said, that woman with the husband was good. I said she was. A bit further on he said, you were rubbish at the start. I said I know. He said, you were all right at the end. Then he looked out of the window for a while and said: I do know you do not write the real news. I just like telling people you do.
I did not know what to say to that, so I showed him the British Onion page on my phone, which explains the whole tradition, and he read it properly, holding it out at arm’s length, all the way to our stop. At the end he said, so it has always been cheeky beggars, then. I said yes. He said, well, you get that from your mother.
This Morning
The editor asked how it went. I said the first two minutes were the worst experience of my life. She said good. I said the last three were all right. She said better. Then she handed me back yesterday’s fifty and I saw, for the first time, what she meant by too long. I could hear them. I could hear exactly where the room would have coughed.
I cut every one of them by half. She ticked nine.
I am going back in a fortnight. No headlines. Just the stool, the wrong-height microphone and whatever has happened to me by then. I am not telling Dad. He will come anyway.
The diary carries on at Londonish. The headlines, which I maintain are funnier written down, are on the British satirical news pages and on my own page, where nobody can shine a torch at me.
